Rapid prototyping and Design Space Exploration methodologies for many-accelerator systems

The ever-growing design complexity of modern embedded systems and the need for lower energy consumption have lead to design techniques which target to bridge the gap between the designer's productivity and the design complexity. In particular, Virtual Prototyping enables the system modeling and simulation in multiple abstraction levels, while the automated Design Space Exploration (DSE) targets to find optimized design solutions in a reasonable time. However, there is the need for more efficient techniques for prototyping and co-simulation, as the rapid simulation has become a stringent requirement. In addition, as emerging heterogeneous architectures expose even higher design complexity, typical DSE techniques may not achieve high-quality design solutions. Towards this direction, the proposed design flow introduces (a) a set of prototyping techniques which target to faster but accurate simulation, also supporting the system co-simulation with other environments, and (b) a number of DSE methodologies for high-complexity computation and communication architectures.